Typical solar panels have an average efficiency of 12%, with the best commercially available panels at 20%. Thus, a photovoltaic installation in the southern latitudes of Europe or the United States may expect to produce 1 kWh/m²/day. A typical "150 watt" solar panel is about a square meter in size. Such a panel may be expected to produce 1 kWh every day, on average, after taking into account the weather and the latitude.

Senior Member

Something that supplies one kilowatt, if left on all day, will supply 24 kilowatt hours.

The writer of the Wiki is either confused or trying to make things sound better than they are, probably the latter. It's like saying your car can drive 200 kilometers per hour in a day, if what is actually the case is that you can reach somewhere 200km away if you drive all day... if that makes sense.

Expert Member

A solar panel delivering 1 w at less than a US$0.5 - or about ZAR 3.50 is cheap. It will deliver (if the sun is ok) 1 kWh in 1000 hours - which is around 125 days of 8 hours of sunshine.

For R3 500 one could have a kW unit charging your batteries (which would be enourmous!) for the night. 1 kW is more than enough to run your PC, TV, HiFi - all except your heating and cooling devices in a normal middle class household - provided people do some scheduling at peak hours.

MyBroadband Member

Nanosolar is claiming that you will pay $1 for every Watt that the panel produces. That's a pretty big deal. Thus for $1000 you can get a solar panel array that can produce 1kW. Compared to the current technology in solar panels, where you'd need to pay around US$790 for a 160W panel, or around $5 per Watt.

In addition, the nanosolar panels are thinner, lighter and easier to produce. It looks like the main problem that they have is production capacity.

Honorary Master

As a rule-of-thumb each so-called peak-Watt (Wp) of solar panel power can deliver around 3.5 watt-hours of energy per day. This can be more in summer and in certain areas ( e.g. Kalahari desert), but less at say the coast. ( and during bad weather spells!)

A 40 Watt nanosolar panel would thus cost about $40 and would be able to produce 140 Watt-hours daily, that's enough to run a laptop for about 2 hours or run 10 energy saver light bulbs for an hour each day. Pretty cost effective considering you'd only pay the $40 once off.